The Bone Field

By Leonard Krishtalka

World-renowned museum paleontologist, Peter Marchand, goes missing while leading a dinosaur dig in the sweltering, desert badlands of Wyoming. He has made enemies from his serial womanizing, ruthless dealings, religious blasphemy, and unorthodox theories. Hired to find him, Pittsburgh private detective Harry Przewalski uncovers a tangle of sexual deceit, betrayal, and scientific fraud. He chases Marchand across 80 million years of intrigue and death, from the bone field of petrified skeletons to the bone rooms of the museum. Ultimately, he must excavate the nightmares in his own extinct past to keep from being killed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: May 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781642370164

Book preview

PROLOGUE

FINAL NOTICE

From: ARMY OF CHRIST

To: PETER MARCHAND

Date: March 17, 2001

Blasphemer of the Lord’s word

Defiler of Genesis

Debaser of Creation

Whoremonger

WE WILL EXECUTE THE LORD’S JUSTICE

CHAPTER 1

WHEN THE PHONE rang, Harry Przewalski was stapled to the wall. He’d been putting up a large street map of Pittsburgh to cover the crack that spidered across the wall behind his desk. He’d aimed the staple gun, squeezed the trigger, and missed badly. The staple shot into his thumb, through the map and into the sheetrock. Cursing, he yanked his hand from the wall and grabbed the phone.

Przewalski.

Detective Parswitski, please? A good voice. Professional. Not good with names.

It’s Przewalski. You got him. He cradled the receiver on his shoulder, worked the staple out of his thumb and sucked on the two points of blood welling up through the skin.

Yes . . . of course. This is the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I’m calling for Director Mayer. She said you would remember her. She would like you to meet with her today at the museum, if at all possible. She apologizes for the short notice. It’s an urgent matter. She said to tell you that Peter Marchand has disappeared, that you would understand. Is eleven o’clock convenient?

That gave him thirty minutes. Harry glanced over at his blank appointment book. That works.

Excellent. Thank you. Please come to the main office on the first—

Thanks. I know where it is.

He hung up, still sucking his wound. Mayer knew him. He knew her. He also knew Marchand, their star paleontologist. He’d worked with him, digging up the past, excavating the intrigues left by a vanished world imperfectly preserved.

None of it mattered after Nicole, his exile into nightmare. He escaped to a war, came back with a gun and got a license to detect. The dirt he excavated now was recent, loose, uncompacted. If there was a corpse buried, it was fresh, not fossil.

Harry opened the can of Drum tobacco on his desk, pulled out a gummed Zig-Zag paper, rolled a thin cigarette, and lit it. The ashtray already held six mashed butts. His mouth felt like a smokestack. His only rule was to lay off the smokes when a client was in the office. He needed to quit cold or get more clients. Cigarettes rotted the body like death, from the inside first. Even he could smell it.

Outside it was raining as hard as it had yesterday, and probably as hard as it would tomorrow. This was Pittsburgh in early August. Oppressive, thick heat alternated with bouts of rain, the moisture above the river valleys holding the city a humid hostage. Occasionally, a brisk west wind along the Ohio River would blow the sky clear. Not today. He owned a raincoat but had no idea where it was. He turned up the collar of his jacket and lowered his head, as if ducking through the rain would make him any less wet. By the time he reached his car two blocks away, he was drenched.

CHAPTER 2

THE C ARNEGIE I NSTITUTE squats on three blocks along Forbes Avenue. Its exterior walls boast 165,000 square feet of sandstone blocks, the interior 6000 tons of Italian marble. It was built by Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and robber baron, in the heyday of the gay nineties. The Institute was his pact with Pittsburgh—culture in exchange for steel, smoke and an eighty-hour work week. Culture to Carnegie meant his noble quartet: art, science, music and literature. From the outset in 1896, the Institute housed an art museum, a natural history museum, an opulent music hall, and an enormous public library, inscribed Free To The People.

Wednesday’s midmorning traffic was still heavy. Harry cursed as he maneuvered his yellow Corolla rustbucket around the potholes on Boulevard of the Allies, then hit every red light on Forbes. In the gray rain, the Institute loomed dark and foreboding, as if its sandstone skin had contracted black lung disease. For eighty years, the ash and smoke from the coke furnaces of Carnegie Steel and U. S. Steel had hung the air sunless, tarring the city and the people. Executives kept spare white shirts at the office to change into at noon. Lungs were not changeable, Harry thought. Andrew Carnegie liked the motto, It is the mind that makes the body rich. But it was the bodies of steel workers that had made him rich.

Harry cruised the visitor’s parking lot behind the Institute, an open, multi-tiered affair terraced into a steep hillside above a ravine. It was full except for an open slot by the Museum of Art marked DIRECTOR. He wouldn’t be needing it. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the director was in Europe, recruiting the last pieces of art for the Carnegie International, a contemporary art extravaganza begun by Andrew in 1896 and held every four years. The art museum had expanded in the 1970s into a new building, a dull granite and glass bunker welded onto the elegant Victorian exterior of the Museum of Natural History. An acerbic architecture critic called it a sterile mating of science and art.

Harry hunched through the rain into a short vaulted tunnel, the Institute’s employee entrance. He took the worn marble stairs two at a time to the director’s office on the first floor. His hair was plastered to his head, his jacket and trousers soaked against his body. The attractive redhead behind the desk inspected him over the top of her glasses, slowly, carefully, almost playfully. She was tight—tight-lipped, tightly coiffed and dressed in a tight suit. Although she was seated, Harry guessed she was tall, with the long, loping legs, tight stockings and a tight body. Even her desk was tight—no paper, no pins, no pens, no coffee mug. Her name tag read Liza.

Mr. . . . uh . . . Priz . . . Prizwalski?

Harry smiled. It’s ‘Zhe-val-ski.’ Like the Mongolian wild horse.

Liza flashed a small set of tight teeth. Yes. I can see the resemblance. She got up and came around the desk. I’ll show you in. He’d guessed right. She was tall, long-legged and loped. Also quick-witted.

Samantha Mayer stood up from her desk at the far end of the carpeted office and walked over to greet him. Gray hair, streaked white, maternal except for the steel-blue eyes. The beauty of her youth still beckoned from between the lines on her face.

Harry. She grasped his shoulders and studied him, almost maternally. Damn, it’s good to see you. Thanks for coming on such short notice. What’s it been: seven, eight years? Here, sit. She led him to a set of leather sofa chairs. I . . . I wish you could’ve come back after . . . after Nicole . . . that horror. And the war.

He forced a smile. His past was in a fifty-gallon drum stuffed with body parts. The museum had become hollow terrain. Tell me about Marchand, Sam.

He’s gone missing out there, she said, leaning forward, a strained urgency in her voice. "We need to find him. We need you to find him. You . . . you know our ways better than anyone."

Harry shifted uneasily. I’ll listen.

Good. Did you see the paper this morning?

Yeah, checked the obits and bankruptcies. To see if I was dead or just broke.

Mayer laughed and handed him a Post-Gazette. Front page, below the fold.

POPULAR SCIENTIST MISSING

by Meredith Shue

CASPER, Wyoming, Wednesday, August 3 — The disappearance ten days ago of renowned Carnegie Museum paleontologist Peter Marchand from his fossil-hunting expedition’s campsite in the badlands of central Wyoming west of Casper remains unexplained. According to Fremont County Sheriff Burt Crumley, Marchand has not been seen or heard from since July 21.

Carnegie Museum curator Diana Palantier, a colleague of Marchand’s and one of the scientists on the expedition, told police, It had been a long day at the dig site. We all had dinner and went to bed. Nothing unusual happened, except we haven’t seen Peter since that night.

Palantier, who has taken over direction of the dinosaur excavation in Marchand’s absence, said that Marchand is accustomed to going off by himself. We’re not worried, she added. He’s an independent spirit.

Marchand, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh, is known for his studies of dinosaur evolution, especially his radical theories about changes in the Earth’s climate during the Age of Dinosaurs.

So, we’re getting worried now, Harry said, skimming the rest of the article. It’s been two weeks.

Mayer sighed. "Right. The reporter in camp, this Meredith Shue, she wants to know why he isn’t around, where he’s gone off to. She interviewed him in June here in Pittsburgh. Did a piece on the expedition in the Post-Gazette before they left for Wyoming. Diana calls in from the field. She isn’t concerned."

What about the sheriff out there in Shoshoni?

Diana’s talked to him. He’s checked around. No sign of Peter. Nothing suspicious either. He’s just up and vanished. Then this hit the paper today. It’s embarrassing. We need to find him. Like I said, you know us. And you know him.

Yeah, he knew them. Marchand and the other Carnegie curators were the resident research scientists in charge of the sixteen million animals, plants, fossils, minerals, and anthropological objects in the museum. Most were a parochial lot, cloistered behind their collections, specimen-focused and issue-deprived, obsessed more with order than ideas. Even their titles—curator of this and that—evoked hermetic keepers of dead objects.

Mayer was one of the exceptions. Before becoming director, she’d run the museum’s mammal collection, the 133,000 stuffed bats, rodents, marsupials and shrews arrayed in cabinets in endless rows, like the plague’s army at dusk. Glass vials held their skulls and skeletons, picked white clean in the bug colony. Minus eighty-degree freezers held their muscles, kidneys, hearts and livers for DNA sequencing. The animals hailed from all continents, tagged, numbered, and catalogued, documenting the life we were losing from the planet.

Mayer looked out the window at the buses splashing through the potholes on Forbes Avenue. There’s one more thing, Harry. Probably meaningless. This past spring, Marchand mentioned that he got a threatening note. In the mail.

What did it say?

Don’t know. He made light of it. Thought it was a stupid prank.

Who was it from?

Apparently, some Christian fundamentalist. Or someone pretending to be one. Peter doesn’t suffer them well. He baits them. ‘Bible-suckers’ he calls them. He debated one here last winter, the head of some group from San Diego called Genesis Responds. Made him look like an imbecile.

Harry shrugged. Why not let Marchand come back when he’s ready, Sam? You know him. He’s probably gone off with a woman.

She grimaced. Could be. But he’s already with one in camp, a graduate student. And, of course, Diana is there as well. You haven’t met her. She and Peter were together until last year. She’s the only one who’s lasted for more than a few months. Frankly, I can’t imagine what the hell he’s doing. We want you to find out.

Harry bought time. He walked over to a large painting of Diplodocus carnegii on the far wall. It was a dinosaur triptych, the tiny head and sinuous neck on the left panel, the extended whip-like tail on the right panel, and the gargantuan limbs and torso in the center. A reptilian bridge—four pillars supporting a ninety-foot span. It eventually became a bridge to extinction.

Returning to the Wind River Basin, he thought, would mean sleeping with a jettisoned lover. He remembered the badlands, prospecting the endless mudstone undulations for bony remnants of an ancient tarsier or hedgehog or opossum that had scampered through a steaming jungle fifty-seven million years ago, after the dinosaurs had become extinct. Days could pass between finds. Then, abruptly, a bit of petrified jaw or skull or skeleton would break the pattern of light hitting the scree on the cracked mudstone slope—a strange being from the past eroded to the surface. He’d squat beside it, roll a cigarette, smoke, and savor the singularity of the moment. Then he’d reach down and pluck it out of deep time.

He turned to look at Mayer. All right, Sam, I’ll look into it.

She broke into a broad smile. Thank you, Harry. Now, I’ll admit to being presumptuous. I had Liza book you on a flight to Casper tomorrow morning. She’ll have a check for you before you leave. For expenses. Mayer stood up and led him out of the office. Liza winked at him as he walked by.

Preston Stewart would like to see you, Mayer continued. Do you know Preston? No, of course you couldn’t. He became president of Carnegie Institute after you left the museum. Gird yourself, she said, frowning. He’ll give you the speech on discretion.

Harry knew Stewart. A few years ago, his wife Pitty, short for Patricia, had picked Harry’s name out of the phone book for a tail job. She had suspected her husband of straying. The case was done in a week. Stewart liked a gay bar off Penn Circle called Planet Uranus, which was a few light years in the wrong direction from the Institute. It was known for a lot of rough sex and imaginative use of animals. If word got out, Stewart’s excursions would bring a swift, polite boot out of Carnegie Institute, Ligonier’s exclusive Rolling Rock Club, and Pittsburgh’s social elite. That’s what had worried Pitty. Philandering was tolerable, but only with the right class of people.

Harry followed Mayer past the marble pillars in the museum’s grand foyer to the president’s office. It had been three years since the rendezvous at Planet Uranus. Stewart hadn’t changed. Natural selection among CEOs favored sixtyish males on whom the prep school look had aged well. They looked alike, as if they’d been cloned from the same bit of puritan DNA—a feminine face gone craggy, short gray hair, immaculate grooming, good teeth, thin lips, detached until death. It also meant less work for the undertaker in readying the face for the coffin.

Stewart rose slowly from his chair and stretched out his hand. Been doing this sort of work for a while, have you? he asked, raising his eyebrows.

Long enough, Harry quipped.

Harry was a graduate student here, Mayer interceded. He then went on to other things.

Well then, Stewart said, you understand how concerned we are about discretion, about keeping the public confidence. We are not an institution that simply loses its scientists. Or can suffer negative press. I deeply regret having a reporter there. I can’t imagine why she was given permission to observe the dig in the first place. He shot an accusatory look at Mayer.

Preston, she reminded him, pointedly, "we asked the Post-Gazette to send a reporter with the expedition. You thought it would be good publicity for the museum."

The reporter won’t be a problem, Harry said.

Good. Stewart allowed himself the slightest of smiles. Have Sam take care of your needs. I’ll be looking for a report from you by the end of the week. I imagine we can wrap this up quickly if it’s properly handled.

He turned back to his roll top desk and picked up a folder thick with papers. They were dismissed.

In the museum office, Liza stood up behind her desk and handed him the check. Go get ’em Prizwalski. He asked her to stick out her left hand. She grinned, then wriggled her fingers at him. No ring.

How about dinner tonight? And a bonus—a short course on Przewalski’s horse. And a pronunciation guide.

Hmmm. She furrowed her brow. Let’s see. You’re tall enough. Sam thinks you have character enough to hire you. That’s more than most. It’s worth a shot, Mr. Zhe-val-ski.

CHAPTER 3

HARRY LEFT THROUGH a basement corridor at the back of the museum crammed overhead with pipes, electrical conduits and new internet fiber. Two narrow-gauge rails, half-buried in the concrete floor, ran down the corridor and disappeared under a pair of massive steel doors marked Big Bone Room. Behind them, he knew, were racks of dinosaur skeletons: Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, Allosaurus and Stegosaurus, their monstrous limbs, backbones, ribs, shoulder blades, and pelvic girdles coated with black pitch. They’d been chiseled out of the fossil-rich badlands in Utah and Wyoming by Carnegie’s bonehunters a hundred years earlier and shipped back to the museum in railroad cars. Some of the skeletons were still in their original wooden packing crates, entombed in Jurassic rock, waiting for the pace of science at the museum to catch up with history. The crates were made from the last of the American chestnut—the extinct housing the extinct. The building hadn’t changed, Harry thought. It looked the same, smelled the same, a static continent that refused to drift.

Outside, he waved at the security guards in the glass booth. No interest. He thought he could walk out with a small dinosaur. Or Warhol’s twelve-panel Elvis in the art museum. Security was a nightmare. The Institute had fourteen entrances and a maze of basement passageways, most of them unguarded. Most of the security guards were in their seventies, snoozed in the galleries, and couldn’t protect their own pockets. Visitors to Dinosaur Hall regularly snapped off the last tail bone of Apatosaurus and Stegosaurus for souvenirs. The first thief got the real one. All the others got plaster replicas.

He drove back to his office on West Carson, a converted storeroom on the top floor of a dead steel mill on Pittsburgh’s South Side, across the Monongahela. He rolled a Drum and blew the smoke into the empty space. The office reminded him of the badlands, spare, stark, almost desolate. The furniture had been abandoned when the mill shut down: a scratched wooden desk, a metal file cabinet, gray and dented, a cheap steel garbage can and an old red armchair. It was a faded leather piece from the sixties, a handsome dowager opposite his desk, waiting for whoever took the trouble to find him. A small end table sported an ashtray, a few cycling magazines and a National Geographic atlas. Two Eugene Smith photos of Pittsburgh blackened the side wall—Smoky City, Dance of Flaming Coke. The mill’s foundry had provided the smoke.

A barge hooted, chugging downriver to the Ohio loaded with coal. Harry stubbed out the cigarette, pulled a can of air freshener from the desk and sprayed. Two windows looked out onto the rusting rail yards along the south bank of the Monongahela. He couldn’t see much through them. They’d grown cataracts, a grimy memento of the foundry being coated in its own soot. The PPG building across the river in downtown Pittsburgh rippled upward through the dirty panes, a steepled skyscraper stenciled out of steel and fluid sheets of glass, disjointed by pollution’s parallax. Seurat could have painted it, Harry thought, an impressionist cathedral rising to the heavens in a metallic blur, as murky as the religion it professed.

On the wall behind the armchair hung two framed pro-team cycling jerseys, La Vie Claire and Team Z. His father had gotten Greg Lemond to sign them. Lemond had turned wistful, his father recounted. His fingers had lingered on the cloth, as if the memory of beating Hinault and Fignon in the Tour de France was stored in the cells between the threads. Both teams were extinct.

His father had raced in the peloton across Europe, a Polish domestique to Eddy Merckx in Belgium and Fausto Coppi in Italy. In the end, it petrified his life, Harry thought. Naming his son Edward Harry after Merckx. Naming his retro bike shop in East Liberty Velo Europa, his Bianchi road frame hanging behind the counter, his memories permanently anodized on the steel tubes, silver-brazed, lugged, celeste green.

CHAPTER 4

NICOLE HAD KISSED him that December morning, skipped down the stairs of his walkup, crossed the street to her brown VW Rabbit, and driven north to a farmhouse near Saxonburg. They’d been lovers for six years, she a social worker, he a paleontologist, plotting their lives into the future.

Her patient, Viola, was an elderly woman beset with frequent depression and anxiety. She hadn’t answered Nicole’s phone calls for a few days. Neither had her grown son, Donald, who still lived with her at the farmhouse. Viola had fallen a few months back, but she’d steadfastly refused to move to a care facility. She insisted she had Donald to care for her. Nicole had seen him once or twice during visits, a dark-haired shadowy figure flitting between doorways, then creaking the floorboards in an upstairs room. Viola would sit in her living room in a faded upholstered armchair, worn bare in parts, much like her mind, the prions in her brain at times strung out, at times in melancholia.

That morning Donald came out of the shadows, outwardly calm, inwardly seething at the world, at his mother. As Nicole rapped on the door and went into the farmhouse, he grabbed her by the hair and throat and dragged her to the barn. If she screamed, no one heard. He locked her in an iron cage, gave her water, watched her drink, shocked her with the cattle prod, and saw the red welts make topography on her skin. Then he stripped and raped her. When she lay there compliant, it enraged him; her body still, silent, not pleasuring his violence. He used the cattle prod to enter her. When he saw her hips leap off the ground and heard the long horrific scream, he killed her. Then he sawed her into parts, into lengths and widths that would fit into a fifty-gallon rusted metal drum. Police found the